Friday, June 20, 2008

With just ten days left in the "Guess the mid-year price of oil and gold" contest, there has been little movement in either commodity price since the last update two weeks ago.The price of oil, at $135 a barrel, remains above the average guess of $119 a barrel and, at $902 per ounce, gold remains below the average guess of $997 per ounce.

The top ten contestants look like this at the moment.Both Linda M. and AWC have the same guesses - $135 and $935 - and TH#2 probably wishes we were using the square-root-of-the-sum-of-the-squares calculation (see last column). The calculation made no difference last time - we'll see what happens this time.

I think I have a bet with AWC - something about home prices next year. That would be weird for him to win the contest and then lose the bet (which is just about a lock as I see it since he was expecting a rebound in the housing market this year.)

Upon further review, I have an entry in my email folder for $103 and $905 from AWC, so, that may be a typo there in position #2 - Linda M. appears to be the real deal. All guesses were published last month here so before announcing a winner, if the winning entry was via email, I'll be sure to confirm the guess.

As expected, there was little change from the top 10 last week shown below - yours truly was in spot number 3 last week but the Chinese seem to be foiling my chances.Recall that the winner will receive a free one-year subscription to the companion investment website Iacono Research , valued at $159, where the model portfolio had another good week and now sports a year-to-date gain somewhere in the mid-single digits, now about 15 percentage points (!) clear of the Dow.

There will be one more update next Friday and then a winner will be announced on Monday, June 30th.